Audience Gets Treated To Whole Lot Of Fiddlin’

The auditorium at Trent Elementary was filled with fiddle fans.

The snow quickly piling up outside didn’t matter. The nostalgic string music inside did. And the lucky crowd got to witness a little gargling, too (we’ll explain later).

There were just a few fold-up, theater-style chairs to spare when the Washington Old Time Fiddlers winter festival kicked off Saturday night.

The audience was made up of guys in suspenders and plaid shirts, moms bouncing little ones on their knees and bunches of bigger kids in various degrees of squirminess.

Once the festival began, though, all eyes - and ears - fixed themselves stageward. Some of the players were of retirement age, others were barely old enough to attend kindergarten. The audience obviously had favorites.

Clair and Bernice Lundin were two of them. Clair, owner of Lundin’s Violins on Maringo Drive, took care of the fiddle chores. Bernice played the squeezebox.

“Now we’re gonna do some Scandinavian tunes,” Clair said in his pleasant, years-ripened voice. “A whole lot of fiddlin’ goes on in Scandinavia.”

The minute his bow hit the string, the crowd started clapping along to the rhythm. Some little kids about knocked their hands off they clapped so hard.

It was fiddle music, yeah, but it definitely had a European stomp to it - a little different from the fast-paced, show-off American variety.

The Western ballads were next.

The Riders of the Rockin’ B Ranch took the stage, two of the four in black cowboy hats. Their style wasn’t the neo-country stuff you hear on the radio. It was old-fashioned cowboy music - a tight harmony, a guitar, a stand-up bass and a fiddle.

“Talk amongst yourselves,” bassist Scott Brownlee told the crowd as the group did a sound check. “How ‘bout that Hillary Clinton?”

The chuckles ceased once the band started. No one really expected a sound that big to come from just four people. “Coooool water,” the three men harmonized, each chorus followed by Pamela Brownlee’s soprano echo.

The crowd loved it - especially when Pamela gave the guys a big gulp of water from a canteen so they could gargle a verse. They also did a mean “Ghost Riders in the Sky” with its call of “Yippee-I-Ayyyyy.” Gary Schuh (EWU college student by day, fiddlin’ champ by night) did a solo turn, too.

Kids played in force by show’s end. Fiddlesticks, an advanced group of youngsters age 8 to 18, performed dressed in turquoise and black shirts. For their last number, the budding fiddlers split in two bunches and played “Dueling Fiddles,” each side trying to outdo the other.

The true opus, though, was a number performed by grade schoolers Melissa Jones and Kimber Ludiker - “Mama’s Soup Surprise.”

Here’s a taste: “Chicken lips, lizard hips and alligator eyes, chicken legs and buzzard eggs and salamander thighs, stir them all together, that’s Mama’s soup surprise.”

Listen for that one at your next classical recital.

, DataTimes MEMO: Valley Snapshots is a regular Valley Voice feature that visits gatherings in the Valley. If you know of a good subject for this column, please call reporter Ward Sanderson at 927-2154.